Ash Wednesday

I do recall the discussion Beagles and I had about whether all laws are to be enforced.  My argument would be that nonenforcement happens all the time.  There are all those obscure laws whose time has passed but the legislature has not gotten around to taking them off the books and you would have to pinch aunt Mimi for taking her knitting needles out on Sunday.  And Beagles might rightly say this is trivial, but it is the sort of thing that happens when you insist that all laws be enforced all the time.

Beagles has sort of a strict constructionist view of the law, they are there and they are to be obeyed,  But they are written by people and they are enforced by people. Not that they are scraps of paper, without them there really is anarchy or more likely dictatorship where the law is whatever the leader says it is on a given day. 

Then there is the thing where lefties and righties want what they want and the law be damned.  If the lefties declare sanctuary cities the righties howl citing this flagrant disobedience to the law, but when the righties pass laws to make abortion impossible in defiance of the supreme court then the law is so much fiddle faddle, and you know, vice versa.  A lot of the complaints about the law not being enforced is because their ox is being gored and not the other side.  There is much more to be said about this, but I want to leave the dusty world of politics for the breezy world of religion.


I should have seen this coming.  There were mardis gras stories inserted into the local news.  Then there were the stories in the newspapers about paczkis.  (Do you know I've never eaten a paczki, what kind of a bohunk does that make me?) Hmm.  Fat Tuesday I've heard of that, and that leads to Ash Wednesday.  Well I know that well.  I go about my daily business and there's some guy with a dirty forehead, and then another, and then I realize that it is Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday, something to do with palms, there is a palm Sunday, but I don't know why, and then they get burnt and I think they save the ashes and that's what goes on the foreheads next year.  I think. 

Okay there's lent.  I know about lent,  It is the month or so when you split a pizza with your Catholic pals and their half is cheese only and you eat your sausage side with loud slurping noises, so good.  But what is lent?  Hum it's 40 days before Easter and the reason it is 40 days because that's how long Christ was wandering around in the desert, but what does the one have to do with the other?

Those Lutherans, a little cozier with the Catholics than we snooty Methodists, so maybe that's how Old Dog knows about this Ash Wednesday stuff.  But wait, the google machine tells me that these rites are shared with Catholics and Lutherans and Anglicans and Methodists.  Methodists???  I don't recall us ever going in for that ribald stuff, perhaps Beagles our religious scholar can enlighten me as to where is the Methodist Ash Wednesday.

And congrats to Old Dog's lungs.  And I had a whole lot to say about Disney but that will have to wait till Thin Ashless Thursday.